Referencing the grid that the typewriter and weaving have in common, as well as the direct relationship between looms and computing, Jen Bervin’s videos experiment with selections from each section of Anni Albers’ landmark book On Weaving (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965).
Each short study is typed on fabric using an IBM Lexmark Wheelwriter 35 typewriter which prints like a weft thread is woven in the machine’s pre-programmed memory mode. Bervin’s videos celebrate Anni Albers’ legacy as an artist and teacher and her love of process and experimentation in her three chosen mediums: writing, printmaking, and weaving.
The edition is housed in a cloth-covered clamshell box with Anni Albers: On Weaving Videos by Jen Bervin hot stamped in orange on the spine. It includes an enclosure with thirteen typed prints on silk fabric corresponding to each video segment, an annotated copy of Anni Albers’ hardcover edition of On Weaving with selections marked, a drive with the super-edit of the sequence and thirteen individual video files, and a typed, signed colophon.
On Weaving videos © Jen Bervin, 2021, courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery; quoted material and images from Anni Albers, On Weaving (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965) © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and Wesleyan University Press.